
Laissez-Faire
- Publisher
- Fw:Books
- Year
- 2022
- ISBN
- 978-90-831658-3-7
- Specifications
- Softcover with yellow plastic dust jacket
21.7 x 28.5 cm
216 pages
Full colour
Text by Eugenie Shinkle
Shortlist Arles Book Award
Imagine a life lived under the glow of artificial daylight, where reality is not experienced directly, but mediated through screens. Imagine a world so densely networked that all of the distinctions by which we have learned to make sense of time and place - interior and exterior, private and public, day and night - have collapsed into a single, neon-hued hallucination. Imagine the collective alienation of billions of conjoined subjects whose sole purpose is to act as vehicles for the exchange of commodities. This is the world described in Cristiano Volk's Laissez-Faire. It may sound like a dystopian future, but it is our present. The work magnifies routine activities and scenes in the same way that Walter Benjamin predicted how technology and capital have combined to change the way we perceive the world.